John Schultz has the most basic cable TV service he can get – no CNN, no Fox News.
He gets his news from The New York Times, The Herald and CSPAN. He reads The New Yorker. Still, he watches network news almost every night.
“It’s a habit,” said Schultz, 75.
What he sees often isn’t to his liking. “I’m disillusioned with the state of broadcast journalism,” he said.
Schultz isn’t just any armchair critic. He views news with an experienced eye. These days, he watches from his home in Everett, but he was at ground zero in the glory days of CBS News.
In the 1960s, Schultz was a film editor at CBS News in New York. With Dan Rather’s departure from “The CBS Evening News,” Schultz weighed in on the veteran anchor.
“He’s certainly an honest, serious journalist, always looking to find the story,” Schultz said of Rather, who signed off Wednesday after 24 years as anchor. “Rather took everything seriously, to his heart. He pushed the envelope.”
Rather’s exit was clouded by a report questioning President Bush’s service in the National Guard. The piece was discredited due to spurious documents. Four CBS News employees lost their jobs, although Rather continues on as a “60 Minutes” reporter.
“What happened never should have happened,” Schultz said. “Obviously, they overextended. I don’t know if it was the producer or what, but he left himself vulnerable.”
With the limits of a half-hour newscast, Schultz said being an anchor is “an impossible job.”
“That news hole is, what, 22 minutes? Every story of significance requires more than two and a half minutes. Compromises are made constantly,” Schultz said. “And I decry the cosmetics and personality. When I was teaching, I always stressed that they’re just a conveyor of information.”
Schultz was a senior lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York from 1968 to 1994. Before that, he left his mark on some great work at CBS.
He worked with legends – Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, Eric Sevareid, Charles Kuralt and Andy Rooney.
Back then, networks allowed the luxury of time. Schultz edited the writing, narration and photography for hourlong documentaries CBS produced each week. They aired on the show “See It Now,” and later on “CBS Reports.”
His most well-known work is the Peabody Award-winning “Harvest of Shame,” which exposed the plight of migrant workers. Made with Murrow, the documentary aired in 1960.
Other career highlights include “Birth Control and the Law,” a 1961 project with Sevareid; “Biography of a Bookie Joint,” made with Cronkite in 1963; and “Bulldozed America,” made in 1965 with Kuralt.
Farm workers in “Harvest of Shame” struck a sympathetic chord with Schultz. His parents worked in the fields between Snohomish and Monroe before World War II. He went to high school in Monroe and enlisted in the Air Force at 17. Retirement brought him back to the area.
“News has changed,” he said. “Back then, there were two or three networks, and people faithfully watched.”
Today, he sees too much opinion and anger, and way too much celebrity “news.” Michael Jackson? He’d only shake his head.
“Television has such potential,” Schultz said. The equipment is now portable and simple, compared with the cumbersome old movie-size camera gear. “TV news should be in its heyday today,” he said. “Maybe it’s too easy.”
I should give Schultz the last word, but I have to add a few of my own. In 1997, Rather was at KIRO-TV to anchor the “CBS Evening News” from Seattle. I was lucky to meet and talk with him.
This lightning rod for attacks on the media was friendly, folksy and sincere about his profession.
I had with me a photograph of my late father-in-law, David Muhlstein, who had been a radio news director in Dallas in the early ’60s. My husband had told me his dad knew Rather.
When I pulled out the snapshot, Rather looked at it closely, looked at me, then remembered that once he and my father-in-law had gone to a pipe shop together.
Rather also said that if he hadn’t gone into journalism, he would have been a high school teacher – U.S. history. And he repeated what he called a prayer of all reporters: “God, let me be there when the great story happens, and please, let me get it right.”
Prayers aren’t always answered, but Dan Rather got a lot right.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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